Muridiyya: Din al-Fellahin

Amadou Bamba understood the connections between labor, earthy organicism, and disillusioned piety. He taught that honest labor of any kind was a form of worship. As with Tolstoy's Nabatov, "He loved work and was always employed on some practical business..." Intellectual work is labor and, in the words of Cheikh Anta Babou, Bamba was a Gramscian organic intellectual. His pen was a plow to break the soil of Wolof privilege and French colonial rapacity. He engaged elite literatures (the writings of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali for example) and drew from them practical applications for his community of Senegalese farmers. He developed a pedagogical schema that was thoroughly Ghazalian.

Hear Gramsci:

Intellectuals of the rural type are for the most part "traditional", that is they are linked to the social mass of country people and the town (particularly small-town) petite bourgeoisie, not as yet elaborated and set in motion by the capitalist system. This type of intellectual brings into contact the peasant masses with the local and state administration (lawyers, notaries, etc.). Because of this activity they have an important politico-social function, since professional mediation is difficult to separate from political. Furthermore: in the countryside the intellectual (priest, lawyer, notary, teacher, doctor, etc.), has on the whole a higher or at least a different living standard from that of the average peasant and consequently represents a social model for the peasant to look to in his aspiration to escape from or improve his condition.

Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 14.

Gramsci is, of course, writing from his knowledge of the European peasant, not the sub-Saharan West African. Nevertheless, there are many parallels to be remarked between the two types.

Today, many of the Senegalese Muridiyya who belong to Bamba's tariqa in the diaspora are urban dwellers, tradespeople and pedlars.

Muridiyya: Disillusioned Piety

The piety of the Murid is modeled upon the passionate skepticism of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111), a central figure of the Khurasani theosophical sublimation of the Biblical religion called "Islam."

Built upon a sturdy "peasant faith" that is unconcerned with metaphysical dogmatism, it focuses, instead, upon the here-and-now, not the hereafter.

This is not to suggest that al-Ghazali was immune to dogmatism--far from it; but he promoted a fideistic approach to religion (comparable to that of Montaigne, though, as a scholar of his tradition, he could not simply disregard dogmatics in the same way that Montaigne did). The advice that he gave to the common believer regarding life after death, for example, is as follows:

The counsel which I give you is that you should not look too intently into the details of this matter [i.e., what happens after death] or busy yourself with trying to understand it. Occupy yourself instead with warding this chastisement off by whatever means, for if you were to neglect your works and worship and busy yourself with this matter instead you would resemble a man arrested and incarcerated by a sultan with a view to cutting off his hand or his nose, but who spent all night wondering whether he would be cut with a knife, a sword, or a razor, and neglected to devise a plan which might ward off the punishment itself, something which is the very height of folly.

It is known for certain that after his death the bondsman must meet either with dire punishment or with everlasting bliss. It is this that one should prepare for; to study the minutiae of chastisement and reward is superfluous and a waste of time.

From the Kitab dhikr al-mawt wa ma ba‘dahu, book XL of Ihya ‘ulum al-din by Muhammad ibn Ahmad abu Hamid al-Tusi (al-Ghazali); text translated by T. J. Winter (1989).

The pragmatic effect of this advice is that it affirms the dogmatic "certainties" of the tradition while, at the same time, urging the common believer to avoid speculation about the details. Just as Tolstoy's Nabatov showed no interest in "the question how the world originated...because the question how best to live in this world was ever before him," so it is with al-Ghazali and the Muridiyya. Neither the beginning nor the end matter but what happens in between--in the now.

Wittgenstein defined philosophy as a "battle against the bewitchment of the intelligence by means of language" (Philosophical Investigations). Muridiyya is, in part, a battle against the bewitchment of pious inclinations by means of prejudice, credulity, and wishful thinking.

Pious inclinations are an expression of the humility one acquires through acknowledging weakness, mortality, finitude. The object of pious inclinations need not be that of traditional theism. Indeed, traditional theism, with its anthropomorphic tendencies, is a hindrance to piety so understood. A disillusioned piety resists Feuerbachian projections onto the screen of the heavens and contents itself with angelic aspirations: the cultivation of what Abraham Lincoln termed "the better angels of our nature."

Because the question how best to live in this world is ever before the Murid, her pious inclinations may be described as "disillusioned."

The Habibiyya

If Man But Knew.

Muridiyya: A Peasant Faith

Think of Tolstoy's "wise peasant" character, Platon Karataev, in War and Peace, Book 12: Karataev "could not understand the meaning of words apart from their context. Every word and action of his was the manifestation of an activity unknown to him, which was his life. But his life, as he regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and actions flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately" [emphasis added].

Whether or not he ever read Qur'an 8:17, Tolstoy understood it implicitly: "You did not throw when you threw, but God threw."

Karataev understood himself as a moment in what Shaykh al-Akbar Ibn 'Arabi asserted was the nature of Reality: the self-disclosure of the merciful God.

The faith of the murid does not consist of cognitive assent to dogmatic propositions beyond that: and even with that single (and singular) proposition, it is difficult to say precisely what is its content. It is more akin to a passional attunement, or an expectation that, in the grand scheme of things, "My mercy defeats My wrath" (a popular hadith qudsi or extra-Qur'anic Divine statement included in the canonical literature of the Islamic tradition). It amounts to a willed conviction that Reality is more benign than hostile. That conviction provides the blessed assurance that Wittgenstein longed for; the confidence that prompts one to say, "Now I know how to go on."

The character of Karataev reappears in Tolstoy's late novel Resurrection under the name "Nabatov" [Book 3, Chapter 12]:

He [Nabatov] was also a typical peasant in his views on religion: never thinking about metaphysical questions, about the origin of all origins, or about the future life. God was to him (as to Arago) an hypothesis which he had as yet not needed. He was not concerned about the origin of the world, and did not care whether Moses or Darwin were right. Darwinism which seemed so important to his companions was to him only the same kind of plaything of the mind as the creation in six days. The question how the world originated did not interest him, just because the question how best to live in this world was ever before him. He never thought about a future life, always bearing in the depth of his soul the firm and quiet conviction, inherited from his forefathers and common to all laborers on the land, that just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but each thing continually changes its form--the manure into grain, the grain into food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak--so man also does not perish, but only undergoes change. He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face and bravely bore the sufferings that led towards it, but did not care and did not know how to speak about it. He loved work and was always employed on some practical business, and he spurred on his comrades in the same direction.

The peasant faith of the muridiyya consists of an instinctual organicism that reflects the wisdom acquired through lived experience--suffering life--and not metaphysical speculation. It is not Panglossian but, rather, positive: bearing up under life's difficulties, pragmatic, choosing gratitude over bitterness and, with expectations tempered by life's disappointments, choosing, in Pindar's phrase, "to exhaust the limits of the possible."

Muridiyya: Prefatory Remarks

By the year 1,000 C.E. (roughly), Muhammad's movement (astutely named by Norman O. Brown as "the first Protestant reformation" of Biblical religion) had been transformed (one might even venture to suggest "sublimed") by Khorasani theosophy into one of the world's most profound wisdom traditions.

Anyone who spends any time judiciously studying the tradition will find this conclusion all but inescapable.

The Tolstoy-Bamba Connection

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Amadou Bamba (1853-1927)

Leo Tolstoy and Amadou Bamba were near contemporaries. Tolstoy was a theorist of non-violent resistance to state power, Bamba was a practitioner of non-violent resistance to state power. Tolstoy supported individuals like Shaykh Bamba whenever and wherever he could find them, but it does not appear that he was aware of the Senegalese sage or his struggles with French colonialism and (before that) Wolof aristocratic tribalism.

That is a shame: for had he known of Bamba he would have approved of the Shaykh's philosophy and methods; he would also have had some of his misconceptions concerning Islam corrected.

Likewise, Bamba knew nothing of Tolstoy or his theories. He was, like Tolstoy, a hedgehog: he knew One Big Thing and that knowledge made it impossible for him to stomach imperial French bigotry and thievery in the name of "civilization" or self-arrogated Wolof privilege. Even so, he refused to raise his hand against either one. Instead, he simply insisted upon his right to live free as a human being, a muslim, a scholar, a husband and father, a leader of the faithful, a friend of God.

In subsequent posts, we will explore the theory and practice of Bamba's Senegalese Muridiyya with occasional reference to Tolstoyanism.

De la Grande Mosquee de Paris

Griot

Tolstoyan Religiosity: Muridiyya

As Georg Simmel observed, religion is one thing, religiosity another. Religion has to do with established forms and practices: it is the proper subject of historical study. "Religiosity," on the other hand, refers to the aspirational life of particular individuals and what Raymond Williams termed emergent (or even pre-emergent) "structures of feeling." Being future-oriented and focused upon human subjectivities, religiosity is not so much an object of study as a phenomenal unfolding in time. One bears witness to religiosity and suffers it. The traces left behind are the morsels upon which the historian of religion must feed.

In emulation of the master, the Tolstoyan consciously constructs (or, more accurately, actively participates in the construction of) her own religiosity. In that manner, her religiosity is nothing more or less than the individual expression of her aspirational life.

This is the meaning of the term muridiyya: the struggle to merge one's aspirations with one's own way of being-in-the-world.

The murid is engaged in the process of actualizing or realizing the ideal self, al-insan al-kamil (the perfect man or woman).

The pattern that the adepts of this way have left us is multifarious--necessarily so, because of the individual nature of the quest. We trace in outline only one particular manifestation of this way.

Al-insan al-kamil emerges in (and over) time as an ecstatic witness who, through the practice of presence, serves as a nexus of individual grace. As Martin Buber observed, however, there is a mystery here: the persistent mystery of the necessary relations that obtain between our notions of the one and the many. For individuality is meaningless apart from community (the "rugged individual" is an American myth, and not a particularly helpful one). The individual self of al-insan al-kamil emerges, paradoxically, by means of its effacement (Buber's shiflut).

Uniqueness is thus the essential good of man that is given to him to unfold...Only in his own way and not in any other can the one who strives perfect himself. "He who lays hold of the rung of his companion and lets go of his own rung, through him neither the one nor the other will be realized. Many acted like Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai and in their hands it did not turn out well, for they were not of the same nature as he but only acted as they saw him act out of his nature."

Al-Ghazali referred to this aspect of the way as the avoidance of taqlid or, as he referred to it with contempt, "the religion of donkeys."

Buber expressed it this way: Even "as man seeks God in lonely fervor...there is a high service that only the community can fulfill...so the uniqueness of man proves itself in his life with others." He continued:

The individual sees God and embraces Him. The individual redeems the fallen worlds. And yet the individual is not a whole, but a part. And the purer and more perfect he is, so much the more intimately does he know that he is a part and so much the more actively there stirs in him the community of existence. That is the mystery of humility.

In the proper meaning of the word, this is islam (the peace one discovers through surrendering self to that which is beyond self)--not as religion, i.e., "Islam," but as aspirational unfolding.

Such an insight may ramify in a variety of ways. Buber remarks, "He who lives in others according to the mystery of humility can condemn no one. 'He who passes sentence on a man has passed it on himself'...Only living with the other is justice." Here Buber states a fundamental Tolstoyan principle that rules out violence as an acceptable response to human conflict and makes involvement with the law courts and other coercive institutions impossible.

For every judgment is a confession. As an alternative to judgment, Buber proposes "the love of a being who lives in a kingdom greater than the kingdom of the individual and speaks out of a knowing deeper than the knowing of the individual." Such a kingdom "exists in reality between the creatures, that is, it exists in God."

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done; as above, so below.

The aspirational self is realized in the effacement of the ostensive self. He who would save his life must lose it.

And he who knows himself [i.e., his aspirational self], said the Prophet, knows his Lord.

Self-effacement (Buber's shiflut or humility, tasawwuf's fana' or annihilation) is, paradoxically, a key element in the quest to become a nexus of individual grace (tasawwuf's baqa' or subsisting in the divine sakina).

He who lives with others in this way realizes with his deed the truth that all souls are one; for each is a spark from the original soul, and the whole of the original soul is in each.

Thus lives the humble man, who is the loving man and the helper: mixing with all and untouched by all, devoted to the multitude and collected in his uniqueness, fulfilling on the rocky summits of solitude the bond with the infinite and in the valley of life the bond with the earthly, flowering out of deep devotion and withdrawn from all desire of the desiring. He knows that all is in God and greets His messengers as trusted friends. He has no fear of the before and the after, of the above and the below, of this world and the world to come. He is at home [in the world] and never can be cast out. The earth cannot help but be his cradle, and heaven cannot help but be his mirror and his echo.

A Nexus of Individual Grace

...it is given to men to lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned. Not only to wait, not only to watch for the Coming One: man can work toward the redemption of the world...It is told of some holy men that they imagined that they might bring about redemption by storm and force--in this world, when they were so afire with the grace of ecstasy that to them, who had embraced God, nothing appeared unattainable any longer, or in the coming world. A dying [friend of God] said, "My friends have gone hence, intending to bring the Messiah, and have forgotten to do so in their rapture. But I shall not forget."

In reality, however, each can only be effective in his domain. Each man has a sphere of being, far extended in space and time, which is allotted to him to be redeemed through him. Places which are heavy with unraised sparks and in which souls are fettered wait for the man who will come to them with the word of freedom...This help is an awesome venture, set down in the midst of threatening dangers, which only the holy man can enter upon without going under...But, though it is only those blessed ones who can plunge tranquilly into the darkness in order to aid a soul which is abandoned to the whirlpool of wandering, it is not denied to even the least of persons to raise the lost sparks from their imprisonment and send them home.

The sparks are to be found everywhere...No leap from the everyday into the miraculous is required. "With his every act man can work on the figure of the glory of God that it may step forth out of its concealment."

Through holy creation and through holy enjoyment the redemption of the world is accomplished.

Martin Buber, The Life of Hasidism, "Kavana: Intention."

Practicing Presence

The "flip side" of ecstatic witness is the practice of presence: being-there-for-others. The central room of the dervish khanqa or lodge is, traditionally, the kitchen. The aspirant (murid) typically arrives at the lodge with the conviction that, within, lies ecstasy. And ecstasy does lie "within"--the dervish herself. In the lodge, on the other hand, is community: and community involves work. The kitchen is the place to begin a life of being-there-for-others: it is a place of intensive manual labor providing an essential service. The murid who cannot be troubled to serve here is not ready for the dervish life.

Here lies another distinction between the state of ecstasy and the state of service. [Ecstasy] is the individual way and goal; a rope is stretched over the abyss, tied to two slender trees shaken by the storm: it is trod in solitude and dread by the foot of the venturer. Here there is no human community, neither in doubt nor in attainment. Service, however, is open to many souls in union. The souls bind themselves to one another for greater unity and might. There is a service that only the community can fulfill.

Martin Buber, The Life of Hasidism, "Avoda: Service."

Ecstatic Witness

But the truest life of the man of ecstasy is not among men. It is said of one master that he behaved like a stranger, according to the words of David the King: A sojourner am I in the land. "Like a man who comes from afar, from the city of his birth. He does not think of honors nor of anything for his own welfare; he only thinks about returning home to the city of his birth. He can possess nothing, for he knows: That is alien, and I must go home." Many walk in solitude, in "the wandering."

There are still more profoundly solitary ones [who]...become "unsettled and fugitive." They go into exile in order to "suffer exile with the Shekina." It is one of the basic conceptions of the Kabbala that the Shekina [Arabic: sakina], the exiled glory of God, wanders endlessly, separated from her "lord," and that she will be reunited with him only in the hour of redemption. So these men of ecstasy wander over the earth, dwelling in the silent distances of God's exile, companions of the universal and holy happening of existence. The man who is detached in this way is the friend of God, "as a stranger is the friend of another stranger on account of their strangeness on earth."

Martin Buber, The Life of the Hasidim, "Hitlahavut: Ecstasy."

The Much Neglected Martin Buber

As Ramadan Approaches

The month of Ramadan is a thirty day intensification of life in this world. Each day, the pendulum swings back and forth between privation and plenty: ordinary wants and fulfillments are experienced with the intensity of boom and bust. Day becomes night and night becomes day. Fasting is followed by feasting. The margins are pushed to the center in a way that is felt, bodily.

The point? Reflection and, ideally, a renewed commitment to gratitude and compassion. Gratitude for all of the things one typically takes for granted; compassion for those less fortunate, those for whom the exceptional privations of the month are facts of daily existence.

"Truly, with difficulty [there is also] an easing of difficulty; truly, with difficulty [there is] ease." Qur'an 94: 5-6.

The Radical Sensibility of Romantic Humanism

The ideas associated with the concept of sensibility in the eighteenth century were a powerful force in the development of [European and North American] art, philosophy, and social thinking. Their origin in the latitudinarian divines of the seventeenth century, the Cambridge Platonists, and the work of Shaftesbury has been well researched by many scholars, and the image of the benevolent man which they inspired in the literature of the period has also received much attention. The shift from a trust in reason to provide principles of action and judgment to an emphasis on the role of the feelings had repercussions in all fields of speculation...While some aspects of sensibility seem nostalgic, the predominant impulse was progressive. The cult of original genius and the search for national primitives awakened interest in the Middle Ages and [in Britain] the misty Celtic past. Even in these antiquarian leanings the spirit of the movement was progressive, as it looked back to primitive societies within a perspective of development. It sought for a similar emotional and imaginative response to nature as Ossian, a similar enthusiasm for splendid deeds and ideals of love and honour as the Age of Chivalry, yet moralized and refined by the advances of modern civilization...In social thinking, the trend was to see society less as a mechanism and more as a system of relationships based on social sympathy. Sensibility also gave an impetus to humanitarian and philanthropic crusades which sought reform in the treatment of orphans, prisoners, and slaves on an international scale.

Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790's, London: Routledge (1993), 1-2.

Although Jones did not treat this aspect of British social and cultural history in his book, the "long eighteenth century" in England (roughly 1670-1840) also witnessed an enthusiasm for Islam emerge among a variety of influential figures in the arts and politics of the time (see, e.g., Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment: 1670-1840, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2012). It should be acknowledged that Orientalism (long recognized as a key facet in the development of English Romanticism) played a significant role in 19th century English Romanticism's precursor: 18th century "Sensibility."

The late 18th century desire to reintroduce "feeling" or "felt experience" to European theories of knowledge echoed established Muslim epistemologies of mystical experience. Europeans, often disappointed by their religious traditions, embraced Islamic emotivism while bleaching it of religious content--thereby rendering it palatable to modern tastes.

And Now A Word From Mr. Harrison

Ibn 'Arabi On Sleep

"God placed sleep in the animate world only so that everyone might witness the Presence of Imagination and know that there is another world similar to the sensory world."

--trans. by William C. Chittick from al-Futuhat III 198.23.

Mawlana Ruminates On Sleep

During sleep, the spirit roams free, rejoicing:
The wicked escape the prison of their nature,
Convicts, too, escape the trauma of their confinement.
All who inhabit the wide world experience release from the straits
Of worldly existence: a laughter that, in truth, is weeping,
A glory that, in truth, is naught but shame.

[Masnavi, Bk. 3: 3541-4, Nicholson translation uncaged].

The sleep of the Friends of God is a kingdom, dear reader;
A kingdom of communion with a reality Divine:
Their "sleep" is nothing less than wakefulness,
As the life of this world is nothing but a dream.

Recall the companions of the Cave: how they slept,
Secure in God's care. That's how it is with God's Friends:
Nothing can enclose them--no prison, no planet, no body,
Not even death.

[Masnavi, Bk. 3: 3553-5, Nicholson translation uncaged].